CHAPTER X. THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM (1800-1850)ration of Independence, in 1776, to the accession of Victoria
in 1837, both limits being very indefinite, as will be seen by
a glance at the Chronology following. During the first part
of the period especially, England was in a continual turmoil,
produced by political and economic agitation at home, and
by the long wars that covered two continents and the wide
sea between them. The mighty changes resulting from these
two causes have given this period the name of the Age of
Revolution. The storm center of all the turmoil at home and
abroad was the French Revolution, which had a profound in-
fluence on the life and literature of all Europe. On the Con-
tinent the overthrow of Napoleon at Waterloo (1815) appar-
ently checked the progress of liberty, which had started with
the French Revolution,^199 but in England the case was re-
versed. The agitation for popular liberty, which at one time
threatened a revolution, went steadily forward till it resulted
in the final triumph of democracy, in the Reform Bill of 1832,
and in a number of exceedingly important reforms, such as
the extension of manhood suffrage, the removal of the last
unjust restrictions against Catholics, the establishment of a
national system of schools, followed by a rapid increase in
popular education, and the abolition of slavery in all En-
glish colonies (1833). To this we must add the changes pro-
duced by the discovery of steam and the invention of machin-
ery, which rapidly changed England from an agricultural to
a manufacturing nation, introduced the factory system, and
caused this period to be known as the Age of Industrial Rev-
olution.
The literature of the age is largely poetical in form, and al-
most entirely romantic in spirit. For, as we have noted, the tri-
umph of democracy in government is generally accompanied
by the triumph of romanticism in literature. At first the liter-
ature, as shown especially in the early work of Wordsworth,
(^199) See histories for the Congress of Vienna (1814) and theHoly Alliance
(1815).